176. The 5 Parasocial People You Surround Yourself With

How these one-sided relationships can dictate our thoughts

Michelle and I often talk about the five people you surround yourself with and how this influences your thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. We often think about the actual physical people in our lives who influence us. Today, however, Michelle and I discuss the five parasocial relationships that influence our behavior. Parasocial relationships refer to one-sided relationships like podcasts, television, social media, audiobooks, etc. Relationships where someone influences us but they do not know us at all.

What I love about the parasocial relationship is that we can curate these relationships. For example, I have been listening to Byron Katie’s podcast “At Home with Byron Katie” and have had many personal insights from listening to Byron Katie work through other people’s negative belief patterns with them.

With that said, due to the monetary structures of many of these platforms, our innocent desire to learn from our parasocial relationship can be thwarted by targeted videos and ads that seek to grab our attention. Deliberately deciding what 5 parasocial relationships we want to foster BEFORE getting on the platform can save us from disappearing into the clickbaity infinity of what is “recommended for you”.

This episode inspired me to deactivate my Facebook. I had previously been using Facebook for the groups, however, I use this less now and I often find myself watching trashy targeted videos. I also turned off history and recommendations on youtube to avoid getting sucked into random videos on astrology or “the divine feminine”. Yes, I know what you're thinking- It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.

Here are the 5 parasocial relationships I have decided to surround myself with:

1. At Home with Byron Katie Podcast

2. Tony Robbins Podcast

3. Eckhart Tolle: Essential Teachings

4. Audiobooks, currently Not Nice and Map of Consciousness

5. Oprah's Super Soul Podcast

What parasocial relationships are you trying to foster and which are you trying to get rid of? Comment below.

Check out

HYPRfocus

Podcast by our previous guest Harris! If you like self-optimization and hearing inspiring stories about other people’s lives you will love Harris’ podcast Hyprfocus- shes hilarious and insightful. Check out the episode below.

6. You Are the Juiciest Peach 🍑

Show Notes:

• Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.

• At Home with Byron Katie

Community Time

• Thank you Greg for sharing your kind words about the podcast and your takeaways from our episodes. This means so much to us.

• Masha has been sending us great feedback from our episodes! She brought up a great point from our Sabbaticals vs FIRE episode, how do entrepreneurs take sabbaticals? What do you think? Comment below with any advice and we will share it on the podcast

• Thank you Harris and Paul for complimenting our law of attraction episode.

• Thank you Vinamrata for your thoughts on our episode on Byron Katie.